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Firewire and Linux?
aozilla asks: "I was just at Pricewatch, and I noticed that 80 gig firewire drives are available for only $200. My good old IBM Deskstar just crashed, so I'm in the market for a new hard drive, and I'd love to go with Firewire. External, hot-swappable and the ability to have more than 2 devices without significant slowdown are the main features I'd like on top of what I get from my IDE drives. I'd like to hear from those who have experience running firewire on Linux. How good is the driver support? Is hot-swappability really supported (just umount and unplug, plug and mount)? Are there any recommendations for PCI Firewire cards for Linux? How many drives can reasonably fit before power becomes an issue (I assume the less expensive drives obtain power from the port)? My main goals are capacity, cost, and convenience. Speed is not too much of an issue, and I'm more a fan of automated and explicit backups rather than RAID."
Maybe you've never heard of an old technology called SCSI (yeah, you IDE kids even know what it stands for?) but it's worked with Linux and even better OSes (*BSD, solaris, irix, etc) even longer than IDE has.
You say you want "External, hot-swappable and the ability to have more than 2 devices without significant slowdown are the main features I'd like on top of what I get from my IDE drives.", well SCSI has had all of that for 15 years. Plus, it is faster than firewire, more time-tested, and there are more people making parts that work with SCSI than firewire.
Maybe you should check it out. Just because you saw an ad for Firewire in Windows magazine doesn't mean it beats the best interface that has ever been -- SCSI.
jason
as seen on IRC